1 Corinthians 13:13 (NKJV), “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

When Paul wrote this verse, he wasn’t implying that faith and hope were less important than love. Each of these virtues are qualities of God’s Devine nature. Each have a critical role to play in the life of a believer. Love, however, is what causes each to flow and function effectively in our lives. Hope always looks to the future. It provides us with a mental picture of what God has promised us. Knowing that Jesus will meet us in the air to fetch us one day, is what the Bible calls our blessed hope. No matter how rough things look in this world, we know there is coming a day when He will catch us up to be with Him forever. Faith, however, is always now! While hope says one day, in the future Jesus is coming back, faith says right now, I can live in Him and experience everything He paid on the cross for me to have. Healing is for me now! Deliverance is for me now! Victory over sin is for me now! Hope is powerful because it gives our faith something to attach itself to. When God told Abraham to look into the night sky and see the multitude of stars, He whispered into his heart that that’s how many descendants he would have one day. Abraham kept that mental picture or hope continually before him. It gave him something to attach his faith to, even when in the natural, it would be an impossibility. Hebrews 11:1 says faith gives substance to the things we hope for. Here’s how it works, when we first read about, or hear the promises of God that are for us to have now, they are hope to us. The more we meditate on those promises the more we believe them, and our hope drops from the mental arena into our spirits and becomes faith! Now we know and believe that what has been promised is already ours. So, when we pray, asking God for what He has said is ours, faith is released on our words, and the power of God is activated to produce what we are promised. God’s power waits to be activated by our faith! Because we are convinced of God’s love for us, hope and faith operate powerfully and effectively - bringing His promises into our reality.